Availability, backup, recovery, and restart on IBM i

Use this information to understand how IBM® MQ for IBM i uses the IBM i journaling support to help its backup and restore strategy.

You must be familiar with standard IBM i backup and recovery methods, and with the use of journals and their associated journal receivers on IBM i, before reading this section. For information on these topics, see Backup and recovery.

To understand the backup and recovery strategy, you first need to understand how IBM MQ for IBM i organizes its data in the IBM i file system and the integrated file system (IFS).

IBM MQ for IBM i holds its data in an individual library for each queue manager instance, and in stream files in the IFS file system.

The queue manager specific libraries contain journals, journal receivers, and objects required to control the work management of the queue manager. The IFS directories and files contain IBM MQ configuration files, the descriptions of IBM MQ objects, and the data they contain.

Every change to these objects, that is recoverable across a system failure, is recorded in a journal before it is applied to the appropriate object. This has the effect that such changes can be recovered by replaying the information recorded in the journal.

You can configure IBM MQ for IBM i to use multiple queue manager instances on different servers to provide increased queue manager availability and speed up recovery in the case of a server or queue manager failure.